Thursday, October 4, 2012

Return to Wuhan

When we last left off I was on a train, leaving Qing Dao and
a typhoon behind. Since then I have been visited by a serious bonk on the head
and my arm in a cast… but that is the subject of another whole series of
entries. I only mention it here to explain the huge gap between entries. It is
decidedly difficult to type with one’s arm in a cast.

But now the cast is off and I am prepared to tell you all
about my return to Wuhan, and how I dallied twenty-one hours away on the train.

What does one do when confined to a narrow seat for twenty
one hours? What can one do? The trip from Qing Dao back to Wuhan is longer than
a flight from China to the States. In flight there are several entertainment
options: movies and games provided by the seatback entertainment system. There
are kindly hosts and hostesses who bring food, drink, pillows and blankets.
There are fellow passengers to hold discourse with. You can bring a book. You
can get up and walk around, maybe even do a few isometric exercises. Sleeping
is also nice.

There are no movies or games on the train unless you bring
your own. There are no hosts or hostesses providing complimentary food, however
there are vendors that will sell you anything from snacks to full meals. I’ll
get to those vendors in a few minutes. There are fellow passengers and I’ll get
to those in just a few, too. I had a book and I did read. I also had a notebook
and pen – invaluable, in the situation I was in. Getting up and walking around
is out of the question, the train being so full of passengers they and their
luggage crowd the aisles. I did do some isometric exercises but slept only
poorly.

Train seats, as opposed to airline seats do not recline, nor
to they consider any type of ergonomic theory. Essentially a train seat is much
like a dining room chair: hard, straight-backed at a ninety degree angle. One
hundred and eighteen seats crowd each car. Passengers battle for leg room and
larger passengers like me get very little squirm room.

Back to the original question: What did I do for 21 hours on
the train? The first five hours were fully occupied by drafting blog notes, and
then recording curriculum notes for the entire year. When Sam was planning
class schedules he made sure that Victor and I switched classes mid-year, so
that each of us would only need to come up with thirteen weeks worth of
material to teach. We could then recycle that material to the fresh batch of
students. Class scheduling has since passed to Hellen, the Unpleasant One. She
did not switch Victor’s and my groups during the 2011/2012 academic year, so he
and I had to expend all the material we would normally have explored over the
two years we teach the same groups. There was a strong likelihood that I would
have the same students for their sophomore year as I had for both semesters
last year. So, to be prepared for that eventuality, I came up with all new
material.

I wonder if Victor is prepared to teach the same groups he
taught last year?

That was just a fleeting thought and occupied only an iota
of the 21 hours I had to kill on the train.

What else did I do?

It would have been great to use my new, fancy android phone
to play games, surf the ‘Net or get in touch with friends but the minutes were
expended and the battery was close to dying. Matter of fact, when I received
that last message from Gary about the typhoon I had to borrow my seatmate’s
phone to call Gary back.

Seatmates! There’s a way to pass some time! I could talk to
my seatmates, right? WRONG!!! This being the end of summer break, the train was
full of students. The very last thing I wanted or needed was a train full of
students, all bound for Wuhan wanting to practice their English, so I continued
the little deception I had refined in Qing Dao: I am French and don’t speak a
word of English. However, if you’d like to converse in Chinese… no one was
interested in conversing with me in halting Chinese when they could converse
fluently amongst themselves. Thus I achieved near total isolation in a train
car filled to capacity.

Now, here is something I simply do not get about ye average
Chinese traveler: instead of streamlining their packing to a single piece of
luggage they will carry several small bags, some of them maybe even just
plastic shopping bags. And then they struggle for space in the overhead luggage
racks, or they put their collections of bags in the already limited legroom
space.

Inevitably one or two of those bags will be filled with
food: fruit, bowls of ramen noodles and vacuum packed delicacies like chicken
feet and pickled fish and spicy sausage and something sweet for dessert. Most
bring sunflower seeds, a standard in China. The part that I don’t get is that
they will spend upward of 50Yuan buying these snacks at the train station
concessions when, aboard the train, around mealtime a vendor will sell complete
hot meals consisting of rice, some kind of meat and several vegetables for only
10Yuan. Why go through the expense of buying the food and then the discomfort
of lugging and storing the food when, for a fraction of the cost one can buy a
hot meal on board?

I admit that I too had thought about stocking up on food
before boarding, but at the last minute reasoned that the caterer will come
through in the evening and again come breakfast time. I did not bring any
snacks on board. To my misfortune the prepared meal that night included fish –
what did I expect with the train originating in Qing Dao? I skipped the fish
but everything else was tasty and substantial, well worth the 10Yuan I paid for
it.

After all the writing and some reading and eating, I dozed.
By now my posterior was not happy and my legs were cramping. Spend some time
standing up, do some exercises… find some comfortable way to sit. By now most
of the passengers had dozed off; I was hoping to do the same. I finally found a
comfortable if unconventional position: knees in the seat, butt on the edge of
the table and head on the seatback. In that position I was able to relieve some
of the leg distress and most of the rear end agony, and I did sleep more or
less well for a couple of hours. Come time for the breakfast food cart, I paid
my 10Yuan for a hardboiled egg, some congee, some sort of breakfast meat and
rice. A nice tea and I came more or less fully awake.

The train skated into the station, right on time. That would
be a few minutes past noon. Thinking of my phone woes and the fact that I had
no food at my house I debated the best way to remedy all those situations
before going home. We had pulled in to Hankou train station, not the one by my school.
There is no bus to take me directly home, and even if there were I needed to
recharge my minutes and buy food before I went home. Breakfast having long been
digested I was hungry again. Even though I did rest on the train it wasn’t
quality sleep, so I was a little drowsy.

Striding out of the station purposefully I considered my
options. Here we have bus 601 that will take me to a shopping center that
features a cellphone store and a Walmart. There is also a Starbucks. I can
reload my phone and buy some of that delicious sausage at Walmart, and then sit
at Starbucks for a while, recharge my phone battery and read or drowse.
Afterward I can take bus 777 to connect with bus 34 that will take me directly
home. The selected buses traditionally have a lot of empty seats so I should
have plenty of room for my legs and bags. There it is: everything I need,
engineered in one fell swoop.

As bus 601 wended its way around the train station and into
mainstream traffic I thought about how I now know Wuhan so well that I can plan
my way around town with no qualms whatsoever. The bus system, once a daunting
foe is now my ally. The streets, once so rough they couldn’t even be called
proper streets glide smoothly away beneath the bus’ tires. The quest for food
that once left me so desperate that I resorted to eating at McDonalds’ is now
so easy I know exactly which store stocks whatever particular item I desire.
Looking out the window at the familiar skyline, watching people scuttle about,
I reflected on the feeling of…